"Climate Patriotism: Sierra Club Endorses Civil Disobedience For First Time In Its History"

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For civil disobedience to be justified, something must be so wrong that it compels the strongest defensible protest. Such a protest, if rendered thoughtfully and peacefully, is in fact a profound act of patriotism…. For us, [the wrong] is the possibility that the United States might surrender any hope of stabilizing our planet’s climate.

From Walden to the White House

If you could do it nonstop, it would take you six days to walk from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond to President Barack Obama’s White House. For the Sierra Club, that journey has taken much longer. For 120 years, we have remained committed to using every “lawful means” to achieve our objectives. Now, for the first time in our history, we are prepared to go further.

Next month, the Sierra Club will officially participate in an act of peaceful civil resistance. We’ll be following in the hallowed footsteps of Thoreau, who first articulated the principles of civil disobedience 44 years before John Muir founded the Sierra Club.

Some of you might wonder what took us so long. Others might wonder whether John Muir is sitting up in his grave. In fact, John Muir had both a deep appreciation for Thoreau and a powerful sense of right and wrong. And it’s the issue of right versus wrong that has brought the Sierra Club to this unprecedented decision.

For civil disobedience to be justified, something must be so wrong that it compels the strongest defensible protest. Such a protest, if rendered thoughtfully and peacefully, is in fact a profound act of patriotism. For Thoreau, the wrongs were slavery and the invasion of Mexico. For Martin Luther King, Jr., it was the brutal, institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South. For us, it is the possibility that the United States might surrender any hope of stabilizing our planet’s climate.

As President Obama eloquently said during his inaugural address, “You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time, not only with the votes we cast, but the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideas.”

As citizens, for us to give up on stopping runaway global temperatures would be all the more tragic if it happened at the very moment when we are seeing both tremendous growth in clean energy and firsthand evidence of what extreme weather can do. Last year, record heat and drought across the nation wiped out half of our corn crop and 60 percent of our pasturelands. Wildfires in Colorado, Texas, and elsewhere burned nearly nine million acres. And superstorm Sandy brought devastation beyond anyone’s imagining to the Eastern Seaboard.

We are watching a global crisis unfold before our eyes, and to stand aside and let it happen — even though we know how to stop it — would be unconscionable. As the president said on Monday, “to do so would betray our children and future generations.” It couldn’t be simpler: Either we leave at least two-thirds of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, or we destroy our planet as we know it. That’s our choice, if you can call it that.

The Sierra Club has refused to stand by. We’ve worked hard and brought all of our traditional tactics of lobbying, electoral work, litigation, grassroots organizing, and public education to bear on this crisis. And we have had great success — stopping more than 170 coal plants from being built, securing the retirement of another 129 existing plants, and helping grow a clean energy economy. But time is running out, and there is so much more to do. The stakes are enormous. At this point, we can’t afford to lose a single major battle. That’s why the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors has for the first time endorsed an act of peaceful civil disobedience.

In doing so, we’re issuing a challenge to President Obama, who spoke stirringly in his inaugural address about how America must lead the world on the transition to clean energy. Welcome as those words were, we need the president to match them with strong action and use the first 100 days of his second term to begin building a bold and lasting legacy of clean energy and climate stability.

That means rejecting the dangerous tar sands pipeline that would transport some of the dirtiest oil on the planet, and other reckless fossil fuel projects from Northwest coal exports to Arctic drilling. It means following through on his pledge to double down again on clean energy, and cut carbon pollution from smokestacks across the country. And, perhaps most of all, it means standing up to the fossil fuel corporations that would drive us over the climate cliff without so much as a backward glance.

One of my favorite quotes is from Martin Luther King, Jr., although it has its roots in the writings of Theodore Parker (an acquaintance of Henry David Thoreau): “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” I believe that, given sufficient time, our government would certainly follow the moral arc that leads to decisive action on this crisis. We have a democracy, and the tide of public opinion has shifted decisively. What’s more, I doubt that even the most ardent climate denier actually wants to destroy our world.

We have a clear understanding of the crisis. We have solutions. What we don’t have is time. We cannot afford to wait, and neither can President Obama.

Do some research – it has been documented previously here over and over again – because the tar sands from Canada literally has to be melted out of the ground and made into a liquid – the tar sands mining firms use immense quantities of natural gas and CO2 emissions just to get the tar sands oil to the point of what normal oil is at the wellhead – these result in massive CO2 emissions associated with tar sands oil from Canada compared to regular crude.

As to the comment about it being a convenient target and not changing anything – that is false. Preventing the XL expansion from going forward will reduce the amount of tar sands oil that is produced (it would be a 50% increase over what we’re doing already with the Keystone and Alberta Clipper pipelines) and burned over the coming years and especially for such a high CO2 hydrocarbon compared to normal crude, that makes a big difference for the future of our world – unless you are a Canadian tar sands oil company…

I understand the process of mining tar sands. And I get that it produces more CO2 per barrel. But it SEEMS that the amount of oil that would go through the pipeline is negligible compared to global consumption. And I haven’t seen any numbers that say otherwise. That’s all I’m asking for.

Kevin — Exactly the opposite. I work every day to fight climate change. But the LAST thing I want is for this movement to spend all its effort fighting a project that doesn’t really have any relevance to the BIG problem. And it’s more than a little disturbing that no one can actually answer the question.

1) The approach of questioning the impact of a single project because its particular emissions are negligible compared to the global total is intellectually bankrupt for a globally distributed persistent pollutant like CO2 and other major greenhouse gases.

It is a change-denier approach.

2) With regard to Canadian tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline, a study has just been published quantifying it as one of 14 global “carbon bomb” projects:

￼“In 2020, the emissions from the 14 projects showcased in this report –if they were all to go ahead – would raise global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by 20% and keep the world on a path towards 5°C to 6°C of warming.”

14 projects that by themselves would put out about as much GHG emissions as the US overall.

Kevin — why are you suggested that I’m a climate change denier when I repeatedly state that climate change is real and it is incredibly important to take immediate action? The fact that questioning the prevailing dogma draws attacks like this is seriously troubling. Nobody ask questions. Just oppose the pipeline. Don’t think about it.

Two Canadian climate scientists, Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart, concluded that if all 1.8 trillion barrels of tar sands were burned (admittedly an unlikely scenario), it would add 0.36 degrees celsius to the global average temperature over 100 years. Their paper was published in November 2012 in the journal Nature Climate Change. I don’t know if anyone has calculated the energy imbalance attributable to burning all or a likely amount of the tar sands. However, at a time when our best climate scientists are saying that global emissions must peak more or less immediately and be reduced by 5% or more per year for decades, the pipeline project is clearly material in terms of its potential to negatively impact the climate.

Citations said “It’s easy to attack a pipeline, but it won’t change anything.” I agree with you. The problem is on the demand side, on our addiction to a high energy intensive lifestyle enabled by cheap fossil fuels. But, rather than face that reality, we instead transfer the responsibility to the energy producers and climate deniers. They’re not the good guys by any means, but they’re not the central problem.

You certainly get high marks for persistence Superman and I agree that demand is part of the problem but I wish you really understood what an addiction is. Your repetition of this statement may mislead others who also mistake heavy useage for addiction and give up on trying to solve the problem, ME

What is critical about the pipeline is RATE of CO2 and methane release if the pipeline is enabled. It can channel to market not only Canadian tar sands but also as yet undeveloped American oil shales.

An analogy would be to consider the number of litres of blood in your body, and the fastest ways one might bleed out.

The Keystone XL is like puncturing a major artery, some might say carotid or aorta, but the closest metaphor is a gut puncture through to the mesenteric artery, disgorging both blood and the messy content of the intestines.

That is a twister of a death, possibly one reason that so many of us get distracted by its sheer messiness, instead of the essential factor of bleed out of too much CO2 and too much methane, too fast.

Where is it explained what the “strongest defensible protest” is? Clearly there’s got to be some level of law-breaking about it, but is eco-terrorism on the table? How else would someone “disobey” when it comes to something like the Pipeline?

“For civil disobedience to be justified, something must be so wrong that it compels the strongest defensible protest…..For us, it is the possibility that the United States might surrender any hope of stabilizing our planet’s climate.” One would think that if the future of civilization were at stake, all options for protest would be on the table, not only ‘peaceful civil’ ones.

‘Eco-terrorism’ is very much on the table, but not by environmentalists. When and if it comes, it will almost certainly, in my opinion, be a false-flag provocation by the Right allied to the fossil fuel interests, designed to enable a crackdown on Greens and environmental protection.

I think it would be best if you took that question elsewhere. If you’d like to know why the Tar Sands Pipeline is dangerous go to 350.org or read Dr. James Hansen’s scholarly and mainstream articles. Do a google.com search to investigate the number of pipeline spills in the last two years (including the one into the Yellowstone River). This is info that is publicly available and easily findable with a search. If you want to learn about the state of climate science, fossil fuel industry failures and lies, as well as basic information about the Sierra Club, it’s all out there and covered wildly by a variety of sources. Tar Sands oil is dirty, pipelines are dangerous, and man-made climate change is real.

Why should I “take that question elsewhere”? 350.org doesn’t provide this explanation, and if you have a link to one of these explanatory Hansen articles it would be helpful to post that. Instead of getting defensive.

I understand climate change — probably better than you do. It’s very real and we need to take immediate action. But I’m just looking for some scholarly support for the contention that KXL will actually have this huge climate impact. Because if we take immediate action on the wrong thing, then we’ve wasted valuable time and resources.

Your point about oil spills is completely off topic. Oil spills are bad. Everyone agrees. But opposition to KXL is being cast in a climate change light.

Keystone has become a symbol. Rosa parks could have given up her seat – after all how important was it, really? It did, however, become a rallying point. Keystone is more than symbolic though once the pipeline is built the oil mining and burning will last for decades. However it goes, people will see the decison as pivotal. Many small achievements will lead to attempts at larger ones. Germany leads the way.

Doing that while establishing a carbon tax is not mutually exclusive. They are mutually reinforcing.

Insisting on whole-problem, silver-bullet solutions is a losing game. We got into this mess incrementally, by many pathways, and that’s the way we’re going to have to get out.

Eliminating carbon emissions is not an event, or even a process–it’s a wholesale shift in mindset, in our collective psychological infrastructure. We have to decide to refuse to compound the problem.

It’s the rule of holes: when you finally discover you’ve dug too deep, the first step is to stop digging. The rest of the solution will have to be developed. Without the first essential step, the problem will evolve into something more complicated and urgent, and the solutions that might have once worked will be rendered useless.

Change: I see your point, but we’re at the point where symbolic victories won’t matter. We NEED to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. KXL will pump less than 1 percent of the world’s daily oil consumption. Stopping that project won’t change the climate equation. We need to reduce oil use, that’s the only way to solve this.

If you indeed know a lot about climate, you already know or can easily look up the arguments against it. As you say, even so large a project would carry only a small percent of world fossil carbon.

If that isn’t your favorite percent to attack first, stop quibbling and trolling, and tell us how you are successfully organizing a move to stop some other percent. You can’t leave a lot of carbon in the ground without leaving some specific chunks of it there, duh.

Until you make some progress along those lines, don’t expect some no-name on a blog to get more respect than Hansen and McKibben.

As you said, indeed the footprint of Keystone XL oil would be small. Like with any other single fossil carbon operation. That’s why by your logic nothing should be done anywhere. And that’s the intellectual bancruptcy offense stated by Kevin.

But the Canadian perversion is the most dirty and a hallmark of suicidally desperate oil addiction. Like a junkie grasping for even the dirtiest needle to inject his drug, essentially proving that it’s “game over”, bottom of the barrel. (If only it were about suicide! The point here is, alas, suigenocide.)

Martin– I appreciate you posting some substantive links. Very helpful. But I take issue with the intellectually bankrupt point. We have limited time and resources to deploy. If we fight a project with a small footprint and win, we’re still out of luck. We need to address demand.

You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You are trying to get the big solution immediately. The history of that has been bleak.

You also can’t let the fact that even if Obama says no to the so called Keystone XL pipeline it will not stop tar sand from moving to the Gulf port at Port Arthur. That is already happening. Obama could only stop phase 4. Phase 3 was just completed without a big fanfare or protest and that gets Canada a conduit to foreign markets.

Keep you eyes on the prize, fight battles you can win, take the baby steps when they can be taken, push for the big leaps and never give up. Even if it takes another decade or two.

Keystone XL is going to be approved.
The Nebraska Governor has approved an alternate route and enough Dems in the Senate will support the pipeline.

Note how our media rarely reports the fact it’s Canadian oil destined for Texas and then on to the world market. How does that benefit the USA, when oil exporting has become our #1 export?
It actually hinders our sales, but big oil is now bigger than any one Country.
Time to Nationalize them…they’re completely out of control and honor nothing but money.

Well, its good to see one of our mainstream (here in the U.S.) environmental groups starting to wake up to how serious the problem of climate change actually is….late of course, but good to see them waking up from an official standpoint.

There are a lot of expectations on our President who has failed us in the past on climate issues – I sincerely hope he surprises us – canceling the XL expansion would be a great step forward in this instance (although I’m not optimistic based on President Obama’s past actions).

I think “Civil Disobedience” will be the melting tip of the proverbial ice berg once it becomes the focus of the masses. There will be a hell of a lot more urgency world wide. We have not really seen our current output of CO2 even kick in yet we are just starting to feel, smell, hear and see the effects 20 year old emissions. And I really don’t care if the FBI wants to hunt me down for this statement but I’ll tell you what — there will be Eco-terrorism

Now, for your edification, here’s the flip side of civil disobedience, social disobedience.

Peace Pilgrim, her assumed name, age fifty, gave up her normal life and just started walking for peace from California to the East Coast with no money and no backpack. She would simply keep walking until someone fed her or gave her shelter. She gave lectures on peace if asked. She made it and turned around. around 50,000 miles and 30 years later she was 80 and still walking. She was riding as a passenger in a car to a lecture when she died in a traffic accident.

Social disobedience is when you don’t set out to break a very small law and the cop gives you a citation, keep moving. Social disobedience is usually legal, but you don’t live your life in a normal way. Because social disobedience is usually pretty individual, it has a power in it where civil disobedience starts to get a little stale after a few decades.

They’ve apparently identified opportunities and limitations. Once the Sierra Club Civil Disobedience Project (SCCDP) scope is quantified, as well as properly constrained by the most recent risk management best practices, they will issue their next press release.

The rally website says the rally is fully permitted and no civil disobedience is planned. So, unless Sierra Club has planned a secret initiative there won’t be anything more than this attention-getting press release.

Now is the time for all climate-concerned citizens to clearly give there leader (that’s Obama) the support he’d like to have if he is to preserve a livable climate.

Funny Idea: A SNL skit in which citizens must repeatedly plead with Obama to do something to preserve a livable climate, while he says, “Come on, you don’t sound as if you really mean it yet…louder, please!”

This is encouraging. And necessary. The next year or two will likely determine the nature of the future we leave our children. That always sounds like hyperbole — and yes, it might be too late — but this is the single biggest problem humanity has ever faced. Period.

WHile the marching is a bit more exciting than actually building real renewable energy equipment, it does not actually solve the problem.

I would vastly prefer if Sierra Club would stop their constant objections to deployment of large-scale solar PV and wind projects. The Solar-on-rooftop mindset which has overcome their thinking has caused them to seek to interfere with other resources, all of which will be needed if we are to decarbonize electricity production and electrify transportation to the full extent needed.

A few – even a million SOR rooftop solar panels – does not take the place of a full 24-hour energy system or the needs of broad transportation. No amount of conservation will be able to displace the fundamental needs of a modern society. That reality needs to be embraced, not by averting the eyes and misleading policy makers, but by doing the numbers and dealing with the fact that the sun only shines 6 effective hours a day.

Love the miracle of solar PV, but its not the end all, be all. We need more.

I’m still waiting, expectantly, for your explanation of why renewable energy projects must be constructed on areas needed for biodiversity and habitat preservation, when there is vastly more land, degraded, derelict and of no prime ecological significance, that could be utilised instead.

“If you could do it nonstop, it would take you six days to walk from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond to President Barack Obama’s White House. For the Sierra Club, that journey has taken much longer.” –It’s about 600 miles by foot and it takes 75 days if you’re leafletting all over the place.

How about a different tack, buy and electric car. If we all purchased an electric car this year then there would not be any need for a pipeline. The oil companies only provide us gasoline because we buy it.

If ThinkProgress readers start significantly cutting their carbon footprint then renewables will take a faster hold.

Daniel Coffey wrote: “I would vastly prefer if Sierra Club would stop their constant objections to deployment of large-scale solar PV and wind projects.”

I would vastly prefer that you stop demonizing the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations with these vague, sweeping, unsupported generalizations.

The reality is that the Sierra Club has worked effectively and constructively with both developers of large-scale solar power plants and the Federal Bureau of Land Management to expedite the development of large-scale solar on public lands while also minimizing the damages to wildlife and environmentally-sensitive areas.

A good example is First Solar’s Desert Sunlight power plant on BLM land near Joshua Tree in Arizona, which is due to go online later this year — where Sierra Club worked closely and successfully with First Solar and BLM to modify the project to protect endangered animals and plants and protect adjacent lands from development.

The Sierra Club was one of the originators of the “smart from the start” approach to renewable energy development, which as Sierra Club states, “encourages environmental groups to work with large-scale renewable-energy developers rather than against them … encouraging developers and public agencies to reduce environmental harm from the get-go rather than trying to limit damage once a project has been submitted for government approval”.

This approach has now been adopted by the Obama administration (as reported here in previous articles) to SPEED UP the deployment of large-scale solar (and wind) projects on public lands, while protecting vulnerable areas.

I think that the Koch brothers are really upset that a wave of civil D is about to hit their fat wallets. One paid company person came to this forum, making up several fake ID names to suit himself (rarely herself), and tried to move the conversation off the topic of civil disobedience.

I stopped caring what the sierra Club says about the environment after they took 100 million dollar donation on the condition they never mentioned again the dangers to the environment from massive immigraion.

I am asking, again: what is so civilly disobedient about staging a rally in DC? Seems it is a very law abiding event. I’m going, and glad to be going. But I don’t see that we are pushing past any line.